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Deals, Advice and the Best Raksmorgas in Stockholm

When I moved into my apartment in New York five years ago, I swore I was going to change all the old-lady light fixtures and install some swank, contemporary, masculine illumination. Haven’t done it.

And when I took over this blog 15 months ago, I swore I was going to revamp the list of travel sites down the right column of this page created by my predecessor, Matt Gross, and add some useful new links.

I’m hardly ever home in New York, so few people see the light fixtures – I rarely see them myself. But lots of people look at this blog each day, so I decided the renovations should start here.

Here are brief descriptions of the ones I am adding.

Reading List

The Everything, Everywhere Travel Blog Directory There are so many good travel blogs that it’s difficult to decide what to include. For now I’m outsourcing the task of choosing to Gary Arndt, who has a great list on his site, organized by geographic region and style of blog.

Real Travel A tip of the hat to a former Frugal Traveler, Daisann McLane, whose monthly travel wisdom as presented in National Geographic Traveler is well worth reading.

Research, Advice and Ideas

Thorn Tree Travel Forum I’m a Lonely Planet detractor at times. But that’s mostly because it has such a huge share of the budget-traveler guidebook market that the places it mentions can be flooded with visitors, allowing them to raise prices and get lazy. But that huge market share also works in Lonely Planet’s favor on Thorn Tree, its online forum. If by some miracle the question you have is so obscure that it’s never been covered in the vast, searchable database, just ask away. You’ll likely get a quick response.

FlyerTalk Like Thorn Tree, this is a crowd-sourced site. But ignore the name: just as Thorn Tree is not only about thorn trees, FlyerTalk is not only about flying. Yes, you can find endless information on miles programs and flight routes, but also on car rentals in Queenstown or the best raksmorgas in Stockholm.

Chowhound In a world filled with undependable user-generated restaurant reviews, Chowhound attracts a much more devoted and detail-oriented group of food lovers with better taste on average than the shrill (though at times useful) masses on sites like Yelp and TripAdvisor.

Afar There’s no better travel magazine these days for the intrepid, adventurous and intellectually curious traveler. And Afar’s Web site forum is growing and ever more useful.

Wanderfly Don’t have any idea where you want to go? Just name how much you want to spend, what your purposes in traveling are (culture, eco, extreme) and it will toss you some intriguing ideas and display listings culled from other sites. It’s a little rough around the edges, but great for brainstorming.

MyGola A more or less pay-what-you-want travel concierge based in India. The researchers – actual human beings – take your questions and comb through the Web sites you would comb through yourself if you had the time or the Internet search skills. Just watch out for sappiness, like “wow, Seth, that’s a great pick for a trip” complete with exclamation points or emoticons. It’s goofy, but it’s the house style.

Weatherspark Sure, you could just check weather.com, but it’s so aesthetically blah. Weatherspark has beautiful maps and graphs that show you average highs and lows and everything but which hem length to wear on the precise days you’re visiting.

TripAdvisor The monster of travel crowd sourcing, this deeply flawed, utterly unavoidable and occasionally useful site has an enormous database of user reviews about hotels and restaurants and activities around the world. There are two big problems. One is that despite TripAdvisor’s best efforts, business owners (and their rivals) still manage to game the system, and the other is that even when the opinions are genuine, there’s no way of knowing whether “uncomfortable mattresses” or “slow service” means the same thing to you as it did to the writer. My advice is to focus on the facts (“this hotel is two miles from the town center”) rather than the judgments (“terrible location!!!!!”).

Where to Stay

Hostelbookers Probably the site I send travelers to the most when I get queries about budget lodging. And always with this advice: just because it has “hostel” in the name doesn’t mean the places you’ll find on it will have you sharing a room with nine college students. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.) I’ve often booked private rooms in guesthouses and very nice lower-end hotels through this site. I’ve chosen Hostelbookers over its major competitor Hostelworld because it doesn’t charge fees and its user interface works better.

Priceline and Hotwire A bit confusing – and even scary – at first, these two sites are worth getting to know for their sharp discounts on hotels (and flights and rental cars, etc.) in the United States and some other destinations. You just have to be willing to hand over the money before you know exactly which hotel you’ll be staying at. (You pick a star-level and geographic boundary.) The major difference is that Hotwire gives you a take-it-or-leave-it price, and Priceline has you bid. They work great in tandem: find out what price Hotwire will give you, open another browser window and bid slightly less on Priceline. If it’s a no-go, Alt-Tab back to Hotwire and accept.

Flights

Airfare Watchdog A site that allows you to sign up for deal alerts on specific routes and browse the best deals out there. It also has links for plain old airline route maps, which are for some reason often hard to find on airline Web sites.

Opodo Opodo knows Europe. Though you’d think any flight search engine would have access to any part of the world, sites like Expedia and Travelocity and even ITAsoftware.com fall short on domestic flights within other countries or do not search all airlines. If there are sites (in English) out there that deal with other regions well, let me know.

AwardWallet A very easy to use site that keeps track of your miles and points on most loyalty programs and (this is the best part) saves your passwords for each so you can log into each account with one click from the page that lists your balances.

BoltBus and Megabus Just two of the discount bus companies that are slowly making short-distance air travel obsolete between some major cities. (As far as I’m concerned, there is virtually no reason at all for budget travelers to fly or take the train between New York and Washington anymore, except maybe during rush hour.)

VroomVroomVroom, AutoEurope and Autoslash Just some of the sites out there that focus just on car rentals, with VroomVroomVroom searching lots of companies fast, AutoEurope having a good international database and Autoslash promising to track your reservation and switch it when prices go down.

Tools and Deals

GoogleTranslate An utterly amazing tool that transforms formerly inaccessible Web sites (movie reviews in Turkish! restaurant listings in French!) into English, often quite well. But mostly it’s useful for sending e-mails to hotels and restaurants asking questions or seeking reservations. (I always send both the English and translated version and alert the recipient I’ve done it through a translation program in case I end up insulting someone’s mother or worse.)

Dealery Compiles a list of the Groupon-type deals in your destination city (as long as that city is in the United States), working faster and more simply than its competitor YipIt. You don’t even have to go to the home page: just type in dealery.com/cityname.

The list is a work in progress, so send your favorite travel sites to frugaltraveler@nytimes.com. And while you’re at it, any links to light fixture sales would also be appreciated.